5 Tips To Get The Most Out Of Drupal

Working with the right Drupal development team can be the best way to make the most of your business’ online presence. It is a great system to use if you need to get a highly-functional website up and running quickly, and its sleek design potential and appearance make it an excellent accessory for your online needs.

Here are five things to think about, when starting a project, to maximize your Drupal experience:

1• Prepare Your Team

Before even thinking of starting a new website development project, we truly believe that getting the appropriate people involved from the beginning is essential to the success of it.

Usually, we find that having at least three people involved in the conversation is required:

• Stakeholder: This is the person who understands your company’s business strategy and the vision to know where the company wants to be in the next 1-3 years.

• Marketing/Sales: Next, we want someone who best knows your target market and interacts with them daily. This will help us guide the user experience of the website.

• Website Manager: This will be the person in charge of the website, and our main point of contact whom we can train and help to build a content strategy.

2• Use the Latest Version Of PHP

Now, the second tip before starting programming, would be to make sure you are using the newest version of PHP. Why? Well, Drupal is written in PHP and is designed to take advantage of the new features and performance enhancements provided by its latest versions.

And, although Drupal 8 can run on PHP versions as old as 5.5, it is now optimized for and fully compatible with PHP 7.2, so a simple PHP version update can be a significant benefit for your site’s speed and security.

3• Manage the Use of CSS and JavaScript

Using CSS and JavaScript on a website is a common practice, as it offers excellent techniques for customization and flexibility. Yet, your site can be affected by too much of a good thing.

Keep your coding to a minimum and try to avoid unnecessary CSS file and JavaScript use. These two can quickly degrade performance.

4• Enable Mod Rewrite

When developing a site locally, mod-rewrite is permitted to generate SEO-friendly URLs. When you move the site onto the live server, often the links don’t work and you get displayed a blank page or a ‘Server 500’ error.

Frequently, this is because your hosts prevented the Drupal’ .htaccess’ file from overriding the hosts’ default settings.

5• Optimize Database

Keep in mind that the coding of the website isn’t the only thing that can be optimized. Database use can also play a significant part in decreasing speed. It’s always a safe idea to optimize the database by regularly cleaning the data and removing irrelevant or useless pieces of information.

You can also make the database quicker by using modules like Memcache. This tool stores your data in active memory for a limited time, which makes it agile to access when someone visits.

Instead of making constant inquiries to the database, the information is readily available. This system will also work on shared web hosting plans.

BONUS TIP

6• Get the Help You Really Need

Our bonus tip would be to contact a specialist Drupal development team, that is the best choice to get the most out of your website, because they will ask the right questions to meet your goals. Forming the right team on your end can have a significant impact on the project.

Don’t forget to ask lots of questions and be transparent about your answers and budget, so the project can have the best chance for success.